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| President Donald Trump meets with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) |
| Add a new territory to the board. After expressing his desire to claim Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, President Donald Trump stunned onlookers Tuesday evening at the White House where he floated a U.S.-led occupation and redevelopment of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. A grinning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing alongside Trump, praised the president for his “willingness to think outside the box.” The looming question, among many, hanging over Trump’s visions of transforming Gaza into a gleaming “Riviera of the Middle East” is what happens to its 2 million Palestinians, traumatized by months of war. Trump was clear in his belief that they should vacate the territory, and seemed to think that many would not — or even should not — return. The United States, in Trump’s own words, would take a “long-term ownership position” of Gaza.
Prior to Trump’s powwow with Netanyahu, a joint statement from Arab nations had rejected the White House’s demands that Egypt and Jordan take in Gaza’s population. Now, they are left grappling with Trump’s desire to do what may amount to an ethnic cleansing of the territory, a move that Trump suggested could be enforced by a U.S. troop presence. “Any relocation — Trump has said it could be temporary or permanent — would be explosive in the region, given the history of Palestinian displacement and the decades-long Israeli occupation of Gaza,” my colleagues wrote. “Neither Palestinians nor neighboring Arab leaders trust Israel to allow Palestinians back into Gaza should they leave it. And it would be politically destabilizing in Egypt and Jordan, where leaders fear that any influx of Palestinians would be met with sharp anger because of the appearance of collaborating with Israel.”
Trump has launched his second term with territorial expansion as a stated goal. While climbing down from planned tariffs on Canadian goods, he has maintained that the United States’ steadfast ally and northern neighbor would be better served as the “51st state.” He threatened reoccupation of the Panama Canal over fears of Chinese encroachment. And he believes Greenland, an autonomous part of Denmark, should be absorbed into the United States in order to satisfy Washington’s strategic interests in the Arctic. But the proposal for Gaza — as improbable as it seems — is altogether more startling. Trump has decried open-ended U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort, and bemoaned the ways in which successive U.S. administrations have squandered American blood and treasure in the Middle East. But on Tuesday, he put forward a U.S. commitment that would be costly, deadly and politically explosive. Analysts reckon the reconstruction of Gaza would take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. Israel has pulverized the crammed territory, destroying almost all of its civilian infrastructure. Many neighborhoods have been wiped off the map. U.N. officials estimate some 50 million tons of rubble and debris will need to be cleared before any rebuilding efforts can begin. Casting Gaza as a “demolition site,” Trump suggested most Gazans would rather be anywhere else. “I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them,” Trump said. “They’ve lived like hell. They lived like you’re living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative.”
That’s an argument increasingly echoed by his allies. “In any city in the United States of America, if you had damage, that was 100th of what I saw in Gaza … nobody would be allowed to go back to their homes. That’s how dangerous it is,” Trump’s Mideast envoy, Steven Witkoff, told reporters on Tuesday. “It is buildings that could tip over at any moment. There’s no utilities there whatsoever, no working water, electric, gas, nothing. God knows what kind of disease might be festering there. So when the president talks about cleaning it out, he talks about making it habitable.” For Israel, an American occupation of Gaza would help cement the strategic defeat of militant group Hamas, which carried out the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and abducted dozens of Israeli hostages. And it would further Netanyahu’s project of “redrawing the map” of the region. Israel has already significantly weakened Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, seen the pro-Iran Assad regime in Syria fall and humbled the Islamic Republic itself through covert sabotage, far-reaching missile strikes and assassinations. But most Palestinians in Gaza see their removal as a bid to further Palestinian dispossession — and many in the international community concur. Netanyahu is dogged by an International Criminal Court arrest warrant implicating him in war crimes in the territory over the past 16 months. The International Court of Justice is still investigating Israel on charges of genocide; health authorities in Gaza place the current death toll above 60,000 people, the majority of whom they say are women and children. Eager for an end to the bleak status quo, Arab governments have linked funding reconstruction in Gaza to the revival of a political process that would see the creation of a separate Palestinian state. Trump is eager to swing a wrecking ball through existing paradigms, and emptying Gaza of its Palestinians — a goal explicitly championed by many Israeli politicians on the right — seems the precursor to a fantastical megaproject on the Mediterranean where Palestinians may not even be allowed to live. His rhetoric also suggests the United States and Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, will explicitly reject the long-standing, if moribund, U.S. goal of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Trump dodged a question Tuesday evening on whether he would back plans among Netanyahu’s far-right allies to annex large parts of the occupied West Bank. Any previous U.S. president (with the exception of Trump himself) would not have found it difficult to say no. In the backdrop to Netanyahu’s arrival, Trump yoked U.S. policy once more to the Israeli prime minister’s apparent agenda. Trump already authorized the transfer of massive 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and, on Tuesday, signed executive orders reimposing “maximum pressure” on Iran — Netanyahu’s perennial geopolitical bugbear — and suspending U.S. commitments to the United Nations Human Rights Council and to U.N.’s chief agency for the Palestinians, known by the abbreviation UNRWA. Both institutions are reviled by Israel, which recently banned UNRWA from operating in Israeli territory. Outside of Israel and the corridors of power in Washington, the reaction to Trump’s outlandish bid for Gaza will likely be an emphatic rejection. In the early hours Wednesday, Saudi officials reiterated their position that there’d be no normalization with Israel — a major strategic goal for both Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden — absent a separate Palestinian state. Prior to Netanyahu’s arrival in Washington, Iranian officials attacked Trump’s plans for the “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial erasure” of Gaza. After Tuesday evening, it’s a view that will likely be echoed by many elsewhere in the coming days. Trump’s intent to relocate Palestinians “joins a long list of Washington’s illusions about settling the conflict in the Middle East,” wrote Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, “ … that Israel is more likely to make peace if treated with indulgence in response to accusations of violations of international law; that resistance to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories has a military solution; and that normalizing Israel’s relations with Arab states, with which it is not in conflict, can work as an end run around dealing with Palestinian dispossession and denial of self-determination and rights.” | ||||||||||